A blog on the current crises in the Middle East and news accounts unpublished by the US press. Daily timeline of events in Iraq as collected from stories and dispatches in the French and Italian media: Le Monde (Paris), Il Corriere della Sera (Milan), La Repubblica (Rome), L'Orient-Le Jour (Beirut) and occasionally from El Mundo (Madrid).

Friday, November 18, 2005

What Did Operation "Steel Curtain" Deliver?

Judging from the pretentious name, Operation Steel Curtain was meant to suggest attempt to "seal" the 600km border with Syria. Yet the operation was focused on a three Iraqi towns, Ubaydi, al-Qaim and Husaybah, and a few nearby villages, which US warplanes bombed and strafed. The mission yielded a bodycount of a hundred or so Sunnis, some of them local tribesmen, at the price of 50 or so Marines/Infantry and hundreds of dead or injured in the bombings last weekend in Amman and today in Baghdad's hotels and Shi'a neighborhoods.

Our undisciplined troops have also enjoyed taking potshots from Husaybah at locals across the border in Syria in the town Hirri. Joshua Landis, an American scholar in Syria, reports sniper and mortar fire have killed seven Syrians and wounded several others. In one incident, US troops shot a young girl in the head, and the brother who rescued her in the shoulder, for kicks, IDF-style. Psy-ops, they'll say.

The operation concluded without sealing the Syrian border, without delivering a knockout punch to the insurgency, without stabilizing the country and without bringing peace to the upper Euphrates towns and villages, as the US armed forces radio by the same name informed the locals in the combat zone.

Congressman Murtha was correct in his call for immediate pullout. To remain in Iraq will mean, if not a war of extermination, then an enduring victory for terrorism.

Who comes up with these terms? "Steel Curtain" should be Operation "Still Uncertain" what the hell are we doing here? I hope Murtha's call for sanity in this insane mess isn't twisted into simply more "unamerican" rhetoric. To save time and resources U.S. newspapers should just reprint articles regarding Vietnam circa 1973, the names have changed but the situation is the same.